Misplaced Pages

Revision as of 00:02, 31 March 2005

The Arbitration policy acts as a guideline for the workings of the Arbitration Committee. These policies are now fully adopted, but subject to amendment. See the Arbitration policy comments, the Arbitration policy ratification vote, and the Arbitration rationale.

It has been indicated elsewhere (see e.g. the arbitration policy ratification vote) that the "Arbitration Policy may be tweaked as the Committee gains experience and learns better ways of doing things". Jimbo Wales has also suggested that the policy is not subject to amendment by the community.

Several landmark decisions have been made in previous cases that may have an impact on current cases; see /Precedents.

Scope

The Arbitrators reserve the right to hear or not hear any dispute, at their discretion. The following are general guidelines which will apply to most cases, but the Arbitrators may make exceptions.

1. The Arbitrators will hear disputes that have been referred to Arbitration by the Mediation Committee.
2. Where a dispute has not gone through Mediation, or the earlier steps in the dispute resolution process, the Arbitrators may refer the dispute to the Mediation Committee if it believes Mediation is likely to help.
3. The Arbitrators will occasionally request advice on whether to hear a particular dispute from Jimbo Wales.
4. The Arbitrators will primarily investigate interpersonal disputes.
5. The Arbitrators will hear or not hear disputes according to the wishes of the community, where there is a consensus.
6. The Arbitrators will not hear disputes where they have not been requested to Arbitrate.
7. As a body reporting to the Wikimedia Foundation Board, which has the ability to direct the Committee to reach a verdict or otherwise act in a particular way, the Committee has no jurisdiction over the members of the Board.

Rules

The Arbitrators will decide cases according to the following guidelines, which they will apply with common sense and discretion, and an eye to the expectations of the community:

1. Established Misplaced Pages customs and common practices.
2. Misplaced Pages's "laws": terms of use, submission standards, bylaws, general disclaimer, and copyright license.
3. Sensible "real world" laws.

Former decisions will not be binding on the Arbitrators - rather, they intend to learn from experience.

Transparency

• Arbitrators with multiple accounts on Misplaced Pages will disclose the usernames of those accounts to the rest of the Committee, and to Jimbo Wales, but are not required to disclose them publicly.
• Each Arbitrator will make their own decision about how much personal information about themselves they are willing to share, both publicly, and with the rest of the Committee.
• Arbitrators take evidence in public, but reserve the right to take some evidence in private in exceptional circumstances.
• Deliberations are often held privately, but Arbitrators will make detailed rationale for all their decisions public.

Requests

The Arbitration Committee accepts requests for Arbitration from anyone, and will decide whether to accept cases based on its Jurisdiction as described previously.

The Arbitrators will accept a case if four or more Arbitrators have voted to hear it. The Arbitrators will reject a case if one week has passed without this occurring AND four or more Arbitrators have voted not to hear it. Individual Arbitrators will provide a rationale for their vote if so moved, or if specifically requested.

In the case of users whose editing privileges on Misplaced Pages have been revoked, they can request Arbitration by emailing a member of the Arbitration Committee.

Who takes part?

All Arbitrators will hear all cases, barring any personal leaves or recusals. Users who believe Arbitrators have a conflict of interest should post an appropriate statement during the Arbitration process. The Arbitrator in question will seriously consider it and make a response. Arbitrators will not be required to recuse themselves for trivial reasons – merely reverting an edit of a user involved in a case undergoing Arbitration, for example, will likely not be seen as a serious enough conflict of interest to require recusal.

Hearing

Participants involved in cases heard by the Arbitration Committee will present their cases and evidence as directed on a sub-page of the case page, itself a sub-page of requests for arbitration, titled as "" or " v. " or the like, at the discretion of the Arbitrator responsible for opening the case. Litigants shall be defined as the user or users named in the case or any advocates they identify.

Evidence and brief arguments may be added to the case pages by the named participants, interested third parties, and the Arbitrators themselves. Such evidence is usually only accepted if it has come from easily verifiable sources - primarily in the form of Misplaced Pages edits ("diffs"), log entries for MediaWiki actions or web server access, posts to the official mailing lists, or other Wikimedia sources. The Arbitrators reserve the right to disregard certain items of evidence or certain lines of argument, most notably if it is unverifiable.

Once the hearing has begun, the Arbitrators will deliberate upon the case. If the deliberations are made public, then outside commentary on the deliberations is discouraged until such time after the hearing has ceased that the Arbitrators define as the period for public commentary on the deliberations.

Final decision

Once the hearing has ended, the Arbitrators will construct a consensus opinion made out of Principles (general statements about policy), Findings of Fact (findings specific to the case), Remedies (binding Decrees on what should be done), and Enforcements (conditional Decrees on what can further be done if the terms are met). Each part will be subject to a simple-majority vote amongst active non-recused Arbitrators, the list of active members being that listed on Misplaced Pages:Arbitration Committee. Dissenting votes for and opinions on parts that pass will be noted. In the event of no options for action gaining majority support, no decision will be made, and no action will be taken.

The decision will contain detailed findings of fact as to what rules were violated, including reference to each specific action or group of actions that violated a rule.

The findings of fact will be of the form similar to:

XXX has/has not engaged in YYY behavior . (diff of Incident 1) (diff of Incident 2) (further diffs)

The initial solution to most problems will be to issue Arbitration Decrees in the form of Remedies. For example:

• "User X, you are making unhelpful edits to article A. Stop it, and take a broader lesson from this as you edit other articles."
• "User X, you are making personal attacks on a wide variety of pages. Don't do that; personal attacks are inappropriate and you may be blocked if you continue."
• "User X, your reverts to article A are limited to one per day."
• "User X, you are no longer permitted to edit this group of articles."

In more extreme cases, the Comittee may decree that user does not edit Misplaced Pages for a given time frame: up to thirty days to start with, up to a year in severe cases. These may be enforced by, for example, sysop blocks on IP addresses and usernames. Such bans may be appealed to Jimbo Wales, who retains the right to veto such decisions.

In due course, the Arbitrators will review the possibility of additional software-based security measures, but will not request such features at the present time, relying instead on Decrees.

Remedies and enforcement actions are subject to veto by Jimbo Wales.

Unresolved issues

Deliberately left unspecified at this time. See the sub-pages for discussion:

• Election of Arbitrators
• Procedure for changing this policy
• Procedure for votes which produce no majority opinion

See also

• Misplaced Pages:Arbitration Committee, Misplaced Pages:Requests for Arbitration

• Misplaced Pages policies and guidelines
• Misplaced Pages dispute resolution